Tag: coding

Here are the next improvements I want to make to the WordPress plugin Basic Bilingual. Considering my coding skills, they will happen slowly, so feel free to lend a hand if you think you can.

Move the language definition to the admin screen. There’s already a screen and an option there, so it’s a simple case of copying and modifying code around to create options for language 1 and language 2, and create a simple function to retrieve the values at the beginning of the plugin.

Allow WordPress search to access the other-excerpt field. The Keyword Search in Plugin Table example in Codex is close enough to what I’d like, only it would need to search in the postmeta table instead of a custom plugin table.

Here’s the big one. Append a language code to any WordPress URL (except permalinks) to filter out posts from the other language. Ideally, would display posts in the language and also the other-excerpts of posts in the other language, with different formatting (smaller title font to distinguish them from full posts written in the desired language). Am reading up on wp-rewrite, permalinks for custom archives, WordPress queries and custom queries. I feel I’m onto something, but I also feel just a little bit out of my depth.

After waking up at an ungodly hour this New Year’s Day (for a [live radio appearance](http://info.rsr.ch/fr/rsr.html?programId=110451&bcItemName=le_grand_8&rubricId=8888&contentDisplay=last_five&siteSect=1000#mardi) and impromptu breakfast at a uni friend’s home nearby) I spent the rest of my day elbows deep in PHP code. As a result, I haven’t written the half-dozen of posts that have been sitting in my drafts list over Christmas, but I have updated two plugins — an old one, and a new-born.

This release fixes the [disappearing excerpts problem](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/12/18/nasty-problem-with-basic-bilingual-plugin/) (was fixed in 0.31 actually, but I never announced it) and replaces the ugly “language box” floating somewhere near the top of the post admin page by a pretty DBX (let me know what it stands for) box in the sidebar:

(I always want to call it “Language Links”, which was the initial name I chose — still not sure I was right to change.) Anyway, this version is pretty exciting, as it does something I’ve been thinking of for a while: it puts the link to the other localized versions of the page you’re viewing in the menu bar if you’re using a Sandbox-based theme:

Otherwise, it puts it at the end of the page in its own div (you can style it the way you wish). I’m not saying this is the best, final solution, but I think it’s headed in the right direction.

You might have heard that [blog.ch is for sale](http://blog.ch/blog/archives/2006/03/04/blogch-zu-verkaufen/ “Announcement, in German.”). As we all could suspect, Matt unfortunately and understandably doesn’t have time for [SwissBlogs](http://swissblogs.com/ “The oldest Swiss blog directory.”) and handed it back to me a few weeks ago.

I have plans for SwissBlogs, which involve a complete make-over and using “what’s out there” as much as possible. I think it’s silly to spend energy re-inventing the wheel. I won’t go into details here, but my idea involves building on all the data already available through Technorati. [I mentioned this idea on the bloggerbosse list](http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bloggerbosse/message/117) but got the feeling everybody was just interested in building something from the ground up.

I have the ideas, but not the time (and my limited skills would make the necessary time long) to implement it. I’m looking for a developer who could do the PHP, MySQL and Technorati API stuff, and a designer to take care of the web part. The directory I have in mind would be a public service, and would be **strictly non-profit**. I want people who are in the directory to not worry about their data being sold or distributed as part of a list for marketing purposes.

If you’re interested in participating, and have **time and energy** to spend on the project, drop me a line or leave a comment. Credit will be given, of course, which means fame awaits you if everything goes as planned.

I’ve been doing some cleaning up around here — mainly the sidebar, which now tries to provide links which make sense depending on which page we are looking at. I’ve also added navigation between monthly archive pages, and I’m working on my archive index a little.

These last weeks, I’ve been getting into quite a few conversations about tags and categories (and keywords). “Will tags replace categories?” seems to be the big question. I don’t think they will. They do not serve the same purpose. I’m less sure about keywords: since I’ve been tagging all my posts, I’ve stopped choosing keywords for them too. But I’m clearly aware that I do not choose my tags in the same way as I chose my keywords — so it would probably make sense to keep them both (if keywords are actually useful, and I keep getting contradictory information about that).

So, to my plugin idea: for each category page, I’d love to be able to display a list of “tags used for posts in this category”. This list could be weighted, or not. It would be pretty simple to retrieve from the database. Off the top of my head and probably with syntax errors, something like: select * from post_meta where key=’tags’ and post_id in (select post_id from table_categories where cat_id = ‘our current category’). Whee, that must be the ugliest wannabe-SQL ever written — but you get the idea, don’t you? Then, the list of tags would be parsed and weighted as are categories in this plugin.

Anybody want to take up the challenge? Actually, this might be best as an extra feature for Bunny’s Technorati Tags, as it wouldn’t be much use without tags. Let me know if you’d like to do it (credit, of course, will be given) — otherwise I’ll probably end up doing it myself at some point.

Thanks for listening to me think out loud, and my apologies to my non-techie readers — I know my weblog hasn’t been very interesting for you to read lately!

Update 31.01.07: The wp-plugins.org wiki isn’t allowing edits anymore. The plugin has been [updated to version 0.6](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/01/basic-bilingual-and-bunnys-technorati-tags-plugins-updated-for-wordpress-21/), compatible with WordPress 2.1, by [Sudar](http://sudarmuthu.com/blog/2007/01/31/wordpress-21-and-custom-field-plugin-gotcha.html). Get [Bunny Tags](/code/bunny-tags.zip).

As wp-plugins.org isn’t letting me in yet, here is a little post to announce my first real live plugin for WordPress (one can’t exactly say that Batch Categories is a proper plugin).

Bunny’s Technorati Tags (zip, phps) provides you with a template function that you can use to easily display Technorati tags for your posts. The tags are stored in a Custom Field, so this plugin does not require any modifications of the database structure. The plugin has not been thoroughly tested on different versions, though it works fine on my recent 1.5 nightly. As it is really very basic, I don’t believe you’ll run into any major compatibility issues on other versions (do keep me informed, though).

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin (manually or with the Plugin Manager, enter a space-separated list of tags in a Custom Field named “tags”, and place the following code in your template where you want the list of tags to appear:

<php the_bunny_tags(); ?>

If you’re like me and you’ve been painfully entering comma-separated keywords for your posts using a Custom Field of same name, you can use the following line to use these existing keywords as tags:

<php the_bunny_keyword_tags(); ?>

Update 21.01.05: by setting $bunny_strict to false (see SETTINGS at the top of the plugin code) you will display keywords as tags for posts which do not have tags.

This might not be the greatest idea, as I believe tagging and choosing keywords is a different process, but it makes me happy for the moment, so I thought I’d share this possibility with you too.

Future development of the plugin includes adding a text input to the “Create New Post” form for easy tagging. (Coming as soon as I can figure out how to do it.)Done!

Update 21:40 Who’dathunkit? Version 0.2 is out already, with a nice little “Tags” field in the post editing form. the_bunny_keyword_tags() has been revised to display keywords only when no tags are present. All the tagging pleasure is yours to take!